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TrEpeetta ti 
pretest: 
Bee sei 

















OF FLANDERS 








Works of. 
Louisa de la Ramé 


( “ Ouida ” ) 
c 
Findelkind 
Muriella 


A Dog of Flanders 

The Nurnberg Stove 

A Provence Rose 

Two Little Wooden Shoes 


* 
L. C. PAGE AND COMPANY 


(Incorporated) 


200 Summer St., Boston, Mass. 








i 


a 





A DOG OF FLANDERS 


A Christmas Story 


BY 


LOUISA DE LA RAME 


(“«OUIDA”’) 


ILLUSTRATED 


BOSTON 
L. C. PAGE AND COMPANY 
(INCORPORATED) 
1741 








PAGE 
The Descent from the Cross. [After Rubens.].. Frontispiece 
preormiece to Listrot: linstrations..< 0. 6.0 see eck cee eens Vv 
manmmere to tist of lustrations ... 22.666. ee ene sees vii 
neers ae he ene oa. or! a dks weakly t hogle wee a cbs oe es I 


“A Flemish village . . . with long lines of poplars and of 
alders on the edge of the great canal which ran through 


Se ek ci ie ek RRS a eae 2 
‘In the centre of the village stood a windmill”........... 3 
“The cathedral spire of Antwerp rising beyond the great 

Be tt E BS 8 cle ha oss ola Wie Sy we ges sels a eee 4 
‘Jehan Daas, who in his time had been a soldier” ........ 5 
“A dog of Flanders— large of head and limb, with wolf- 

Perea ACOA eer mmeTOC Uy ily ce nls ose swiss oe eee waite g 6 
So suen, sl-uving, orutal Brabantois”...........60.00%s 8 
“The Brabantois had paused to drink beer himself at every 

See eRe Meee eyed eo cls 0. <\ 2s o! sia oO he woe oe ey wale ointe 9 
“Cursed him fiercely in farewell . . . and pushed the cart 

EN aa OE FE I) | a II 
“‘Kneeled in the grass of the ditch and surveyed the dog 

IURSRER CRE VOR OL PNY so. soso othe wie etree nae e0e we 14 
‘‘He had a corner of the hut, with a heap of dry grass for 

DR ee lcs co ena 16 
“ But it was becoming hard work for the old man”.......+ 18 


vi LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 


PAGK 
“ ree to play with his fellow-dogs” 72). =) eee 20 
“So paralyzed with rheumatism that it was impossible for 
him tO ZO OUG? oes yn S's 60.0 we 6 0 eee 21 
“Some figure coming athwart the fields made picturesque 
by a gleaner’s bundle or a woodman’s fagot ”.......... 24, 
“The cumbrous vessels drifting by”... yan see adem Be eee 25 
“‘And then sometimes in the streets of Antwerp, some house- 
wife would bring them a handful of bread” ........... 27 
Rubens o 2c.) gees ees ncly sels s'0e we al ee ee 29 
“Old piles of stones, dark and ancient and majestic, stand- 
ing in crooked courts’. 0.0. 2 as = am tee 29 
“The small tumbledown gray church opposite the red wind- 
Mi a eon der dee eee se8. og on eres ieee 32 
“ Nello would sit silent and dreaming, not caring to play”... 33 
“ Going on his ways through the old city”......... paneer 36 
AlOI1S oo ous ee ale’s ou wee wwe, 6 ere a ot gael ere ee 40 
Baas Cogez, “a good man, but somewhat stern”.......... 41 
‘Sitting amidst the hay, with the great tawny head of Pa- 
trasche on her lap.” . 6. sesas oes eels oe een 42 
The. Miller’s Wife’... 2... os 0s ase « am 0 Oe 44 
“¢ She ran to him and held him close” .2o.08 0) = ee 49 
‘Went home by themselves to the little dark hut and the 
meal of black bread” <0... 5 vats « @teveenen tes ene 52 
“All the spring and summer and autumn Nello had been at 
work upon the treasure”... .. .. 0 su epee ieee 58 
“My poor Patrasche, we shall soon lie quiet together, you 
and 1” 2. kee lean sc see esis 0 en tte ae 63 
“They mourned him passionately”... o5.5 52s 4052S eeeee 70 
‘““The boy and the dog went on again wearily” ........... 75 
“The boy mechanically turned the case to the light” ...... 78 
“Nello had gone to face starvation and misery alone”’..... 82 


“The housewife sat with calm contented face at the spinning- 
wheel? .... ce veces wie b's os 0s ore a ee pe pate ee 83 - 
“Vie scons was lost and again recovered a ee nes times 
OF MOLE? oe hk sv ha tee wale owe alt me SO 85 


Rist OF ILLUSTRATIONS. Vil 


PAGE 
«Some group went homeward with lanterns, chanting drink- 
eC eR AEE big nics caw ls id sede wales ev fos waa be 86 
“ He is gone to the things that he loved”......... ry Pelee” 87 
“Suddenly through the darkness a great white radiance 
ee Et aia bis le oa on nies Wsl'si4 6 ore a 'ele eke tens go 
RMON RSET Wiis MG nce cceiais vs cco seceec ees nesenes 94 














pa 








A DOG OF FLANDERS: 


A STORY OF NOEL. 





WELLO and Patrasche were left 
all alone in the world. 
hey wete friends. in +a 
friendship closer than brother- 
hood. Nello was a little Ar- 
dennois; Patrasche was a big 
Fleming. They were both of 
the same age by length of 
years, yet one was still young, 
<2 <a =.7; and the other was already old. 
S Se ae They had dwelt together al- 
“ most all their days: both were 
orphaned and destitute, and owed their 
lives to the same hand. It had been 
the beginning of the tie between them, 
their first bond of sympathy; and it had 
strengthened day by day, and had grown 
with their growth, firm and indissoluble, 
until they loved one another very greatly. 


I 


4 A DOG OF FLANDERS. 


Their home was a little hut on the 
edge of a little village —a Flemish village 
a league from Antwerp, set amidst flat 
breadths of pasture and corn-lands, with 
long lines of poplars and of alders bend- 
ing in the breeze on the edge of the great 





canal which ran through it. It had about 
a score of houses and homesteads, with 
shutters of bright green or sky-blue, and 
roofs rose-red or black and white, and 
walls whitewashed until they shone in the 
sun like snow. In the centre of the vil- 
lage stood a windmill, placed on a little 
moss-grown slope: it was a landmark to 
all the level country round. It had once 


A DOG OF FLANDERS. 3 


been painted scarlet, sails and all, but that 
had been in its infancy, half a century or 
more earlier, when it 
had ground wheat for 
the soldiers of Napo- 
leon; and it was now 
a ruddy brown, tanned 
by wind and weather. 
It went queerly by fits 
and starts, as though 
rheumatic and stiff in 
the joints from age, 
but it served the whole 
neighborhood, which 
would have thought it almost as impious 
to carry grain elsewhere as to attend any 
other religious service than the mass that 
was performed at the altar of the little 
old gray church, with its conical steeple, 
which stood opposite to it, and whose 
single bell rang morning, noon and night 
with that strange, subdued, hollow sad- 
ness which every bell that hangs in the 
Low Countries seems to gain as an inte- 
gral part of its melody. 





























4. A DOG OF FLANDERS. 


Within sound of the little melancholy 
clock, almost from their birth upward, they 
had dwelt together, Nello and Patrasche, 
in the little hut on the edge of the village, 
with the cathedral spire of Antwerp rising 
in the northeast, beyond the great green 
plain of seeding grass and spreading corn 





- LA "Ld a Ware = =) 
I) "al l rs 5 = 
Be er See ee asara 
= aed ; YA ook es 


Pe acc i a omptree Y 
that stretched away from them like a tide- 
less, changeless sea. It was the hut of a 
very old man, of a very poor man — of old 
Jehan Daas, who in his time had been a 
soldier, and who remembered the wars 
that had trampled the country as oxen 
tread down the furrows, and who had 
brought from his service nothing except 
a wound, which had made him a cripple. 
When old Jehan Daas had reached his 


full eighty, his daughter had died in the 


A DOG OF FLANDERS. 5 


Ardennes, hard by Stavelot, and had left 
him in legacy her two-year old son. The 
old man could ill contrive to support him- 
self, but he took up the add1- 
tional burden uncomplainingly, 
and it soon became welcome 
and precious to him. Little 
Nello—which was but a pet 
diminutive for Nicolas — throve 
with him, and the old man 
and the little child lived in the poor little 
hut contentedly. 

It was a very humble httle mud-hut 
indeed, but it was clean and white as a 
seashell, and stood in a small plot of 
garden-ground that yielded beans and 
herbs and pumpkins. They were very 
poor, terribly poor—many a day they 
had nothing at all to eat. They never 
by any chance had enough: to have had 
enough to eat would have been to have 
reached paradise at once. But the old 
man was very gentle and good to the boy, 
and the boy was a beautiful, innocent, 
truthful, tender-natured creature; and they 





6 A DOG OF FLANDERS. 


were happy on a crust and a few leaves 
of cabbage, and asked no more of earth 
or Heaven; save indeed that Patrasche 
should be always with them, since without 
Patrasche, where would they have been? 
For Patrasche was their alpha and 
omega; their treasury and granary; their 
store of gold and wand of wealth; their 
bread-winner and minister; their only 
friend and comforter. Patrasche dead or 
gone from them, they must have laid 
themselves down and died likewise. Pa- 
trasche was body, brains, hands, head and 
feet to both of them: Patrasche was their 
very life, their very soul. For 
Jehan Daas was old and a crip- 
ple, and Nello was but a child; 
and Patrasche was their dog. 
A dog of Flanders — yellow 
/ of hide, large of head and limb, 
' with wolflike ears that stood 
erect, and legs bowed and feet 
widened in the muscular development 
wrought in his breed by many genera: 
tions of hard service. Patrasche came of! 





A DOG OF FLANDERS. 7 


a race which had toiled hard and cruelly 
from sire to son in Flanders many a cen- 
tury — slaves of slaves, dogs of the people, 
beasts of the shafts and the harness, crea- 
tures that lived straining their sinews in 
the gall of the cart, and died breaking 
their hearts on the flints of the streets. 

Patrasche had been born of parents who 
had labored hard all their days over the 
sharp-set stones of the various cities and 
the long, shadowless, weary roads of the 
two Flanders and of Brabant. He had 
been born to no other heritage than those 
of pain and of toil. He had been fed on 
curses and baptized with blows. Why 
not? It was a Christian country, and 
Patrasche was but adog. Before he was 
fully grown he had known the bitter gall 
of the cart and the collar. Before he had 
entered his thirteenth month he had be- 
come the property of a hardware dealer, 
who was accustomed to wander over the 
land north and south, from the blue sea to 
the green mountains. They sold him for 
a small price because he was so young. 


683 ‘4 DOG OF FLANDERS. 


This man was a drunkard and a brute. 
The life of Patrasche was a life of hell. 
To deal the tortures of hell on the animal 
creation 1s a way which the Christians 
have of showing their belief in it. His 
purchaser was a sullen, ill-living, brutal 
Brabantois, who heaped his 
cart full with pots and pans 
and flagons and_ buckets, 
and other wares of crock- 
ery and brass and tin, and 
~~. \eft Patrasche to draw the 
load as best he might, whilst 
he himself lounged idly by 
the side in fat and sluggish ease, smoking 
his black pipe and stopping at every wine- 
shop or café on the road. 

Happily for Patrasche—or unhappily 
—he was very strong: he came of an 
iron race, long born and bred to such 
cruel travail; so that he did not die, but 
managed to drag on a wretched existence 
under the brutal burdens, the scarifying 
lashes, the hunger, the thirst, the blows, 
the curses and the exhaustion which are 





A DOG OF FLANDERS. 9 


the only wages with which the Flemings 
repay the most patient and laborious of all 
their four-footed victims. One day, after 
two years of this long and deadly agony, 
Patrasche was going 
on as usual along one 
of the straight, dusty, 
unlovely roads that 
lead to the city of 
Rubens. It was full 
midsummer, and very 
warm. His cart was 
very heavy, piled high 
with goods in metal 
and in earthenware. 
His owner sauntered 
on without noticing 
him otherwise than 
by the crack of the 
whip as it curled round his quivering reins 
The Brabantois had paused to drink beer 
himself at every wayside house, but he had 
forbidden Patrasche to stop a moment for 
a draught from the canal. Going along 
thus, in the full sun, on a scorching high- 














Io A DOG OF FLANDERS. 


way, having eaten nothing for twenty-four 
hours, and, which was far worse to him, 
not having tasted water for nearly twelve, 
being blind with dust, sore with blows and 
stupefied with the merciless weight which 
dragged upon his loins, Patrasche, for once, 
staggered and foamed a little at the mouth, 
and fell. 

He fell in the middle of the white, 
dusty road, in the full glare of the sun: 
he was sick unto death, and motionless. 
His master gaye him the only medicine 
in his pharmacy —kicks and oaths and 
blows with a cudgel of oak, which had 
been often the only food and drink, the 
only wage and reward, ever offered to 
him. But Patrasche was beyond the 
reach of any torture or of any curses. 
Patrasche lay, dead to all appearances, 
down in the white powder of the summer 
dust. After a while, finding it useless to 
assail his ribs with punishment and his 
ears with maledictions, the Brabantois — 
deeming life gone in him, or going so 
nearly that his carcass was forever use- 


A DOG OF FLANDERS. I! 


less, unless indeed some one should strip 
it of the skin for gloves—cursed him 





fiercely in farewell, struck off the leathern 
bands of the harness, kicked his body 
heavily aside into the grass, and, groaning 


12 A DOG OF FLANDERS. 


and muttering in savage wrath, pushed 
the cart lazily along the road up hill, and 
left the dying dog there for the ants to 
sting and for the crows to pick. 

It was the last day before Kermesse, 
away at Louvain, and the Brabantois was 
in haste to reach the fair and get a good 
place for his truck of brass wares. He 
was in fierce wrath, because Patrasche 
had been a strong and much-enduring 
animal, and because he himself had now 
the hard task of pushing his charette 
all the way to Louvain. But to stay to 
look after Patrasche never entered his 
thoughts: the beast was dying and _ use- 
less, and he would steal, to replace him, 
the first large dog that he found wan- 
dering alone out of sight of its master. 
Patrasche had cost him nothing, or next to 
nothing, and for two long, cruel years he 
had made him toil ceaselessly in his ser- 
vice from sunrise to sunset, through sum- 
mer and winter, in fair weather and foul. 

He had got a fair use and a good profit 
out of Patrasche: being human, he was 


A DOG OF FLANDERS. 13 


wise, and left the dog to draw his last 
breath alone in the ditch, and have his 
bloodshot eyes plucked out as they might 
be by the birds, whilst he himself went on 
his way to beg and to steal, to eat and 
to drink, to dance and to sing, in the 
mirth at Louvain. A dying dog, a dog 
of the cart—why should he waste hours 
over its agonies at peril of losing a hand- 
ful of copper coins, at peril of a shout of 
laughter? 

Patrasche lay there, flung in the grass- 
green ditch. It was a busy road that day, 
and hundreds of people, on foot and on 
mules, 1n wagons or in carts, went by, 
tramping quickly and joyously on to Lou- 
vain. Some saw him, most did not even 
look: all passed on. A dead dog more 
or less —it was nothing in Brabant: it 
would be nothing anywhere in the world. 

After a time, amongst the holiday- 
makers, there came a little old man who 
was bent and lame, and very feeble. 
He was in no guise for feasting: he was 


very poorly and miserably clad, and he 


14 A DOG OF FLANDERS. 


dragged his silent way slowly through the 
dust amongst the pleasure-seekers. He 
looked at Patrasche, paused, wondered, 
turned aside, then kneeled down in the 
rank grass and weeds of the ditch, and 
surveyed the dog with kindly eyes of pity. 





There was with him a little rosy, fair- 
haired, dark-eyed child of a few years old, 
who pattered in amidst the bushes, that 
were for him breast-high, and stood gazing 
with a pretty seriousness upon the poor 
great, quiet beast. 

Thus it was that these two first met — 
the little Nello and the big Patrasche. 


A DOG OF FLANDERS. 15 


The upshot of that day was, that old 
Jehan Daas, with much laborious effort, 
drew the sufferer homeward to his own 
little hut, which was a stone’s throw off 
amidst the fields, and there tended him 
with so much care that the sickness, which 
had been a brain-seizure, brought on by 
heat and thirst and exhaustion, with time 
and shade and rest passed away, and 
health . and strength returned, and Pa- 
trasche staggered up again upon his four 
stout, tawny legs. 

Now for many weeks he had been use- 
less, powerless, sore, near to death; but 
all this time he had heard no rough word, 
had felt no harsh touch, but only the pity- 
ing murmurs of the little child’s voice and 
the soothing caress of the old man’s hand. ~ 

In his sickness they too had grown to 
care for him, this lonely old man and the 
little happy child. He had a corner of 
the hut, with a heap of dry grass for his 
bed; and they had learned to listen 
eagerly for his breathing in the dark 
night, to tell them that he lived; and 


16 A DOG OF FLANDERS. 


when he first was well enough to essay 
a loud, hollow, broken bay, they laughed 
aloud, and almost wept together for joy 
at such a sign of his sure restoration; 
and little Nello, in delighted glee, hung 








round his rugged neck with chains of 
marguerites, and kissed him with fresh 
and ruddy lips. 

So then, when Patrasche arose, himself 
again, strong, big, gaunt, powerful, his 
great wistful eyes had a gentle astonish- 
ment in them that there were no curses 
to rouse him and no blows to drive him; 


A DOG OF FLANDERS. iy 


and his heart awakened to a mighty love, 
which never wavered once in its fidelity 
whilst life abode with him. 

But Patrasche, being a dog, was grate- 
ful. Patrasche lay pondering long with 
grave, tender, musing brown eyes, watch- 
ing the movements of his friends. 

Now, the old soldier, Jehan Daas, could 
do nothing for his living but limp about 
a little with a small cart, with which he 
carried daily the milk-cans of those hap- 
pier neighbors who owned cattle away into 
the town of Antwerp. ‘The villagers gave 
him the employment a little out of charity 
—more because it suited them well to 
send their milk into the town by so hon- 
est a carrier, and bide at home themselves 
to look after their gardens, their cows, 
their poultry or their little fields. But it 
was becoming hard work for the old man. 
He was eighty-three, and Antwerp was a 
good league off, or more. 

Patrasche watched the milk-cans come 
and go that one day when he had got 
well and was lying in the sun with the 


18 A DOG OF FLANDERS. 


wreath of marguerites round his tawny 
neck. : 

The next morning, Patrasche, before the 
old man had touched the cart, arose and 
walked to it and placed himself betwixt 









See any : 2 
ei ae 
ap 7 Ah. i} Ha | \) eee 
all fh Wy hes i 
/ ibe Ag 


its handles, and testified as plainly as 
dumb show could do his desire and his 
ability to work in return for the bread 
of charity that he had eaten. Jehan Daas 
resisted long, for the old man was one 
of those who thought it a foul shame to 
bind dogs to labor for which Nature never 


A DOG OF FLANDERS. 19 


formed them. But Patrasche would not 
be gainsaid: finding they did not harness 
him, he tried to draw the cart onward with 
his teeth. 

At length Jehan Daas gave way, van- 
quished by the persistence and the grati- 
tude of this creature whom he had suc- 
cored. He fashioned his cart so that 
Patrasche could run in it, and this he 
did every morning of his life thencefor- 
ward. 

When the winter came, Jehan Daas 
thanked the blessed fortune that had 
brought him to the dying dog in the 
ditch that fair-day of Louvain; for he 
was very old, and he grew feebler with 
each year, and he would ill have known 
how to pull his load of milk-cans over the 
snows and through the deep ruts in the 
mud if it had not been for the strength 
and the industry of the animal he had 
befriended. As for Patrasche, it seemed 
heaven to him. After the frightful bur- 
dens that his old master had compelled 
him to strain under, at the call of the 


20 A DOG OF FLANDERS. 


whip at every step, it seemed nothing to 
him but amusement to step out with this 
little light green cart, with its bright brass 
cans, by the side of the gentle old man 
who always paid him with a tender caress 
and with a kindly word. Besides, his work 


- + 






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a he Alita 
fa ee % 
nwt ‘atic 








Whi ) 
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je {, + Ne 
ai WG A bsg rs 
i Mere ps die eae ‘ 
tee 






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A yp a Ht 
f iC Uf rag : is /, y ea ft 
aa fl, 4 ‘ y hag 
Es ; ay aM bi vi Mer f an i nL 
z rx nae ee ce ee ie 
coe UN My KA Ye N, Ny vat iheretN ty tn 7 Sign 


was over by three or four in the day, and 
after that time he was free to do as he 
would — to stretch himself, to sleep in 
the sun, to wander in the fields, to romp 
with the young child or to play with his 
fellow-dogs. Patrasche was very happy. 
Fortunately for his peace, his former 
owner was killed in a drunken brawl at 


meOG OF FLANDERS. a1 


the kermesse of Mechlin, and so sought 
not after him nor disturbed him in his 
new and well-loved home. 

A few years later, old Jehan Daas, who 
had always been a cripple, became so par- 





















































alyzed with rheumatism that it was impos- 
sible for him to go out with the cart any 
more. Then little Nello, being now grown 
to his sixth year of age, and knowing the 
town well from having accompanied his 
grandfather so many times, took his place 


22 A DOG OF FLANDERS, 


beside the cart, and sold the milk and re- 
ceived the coins in exchange, and brought 
them back to their respective owners with 
a pretty grace and seriousness which 
charmed all who beheld him. 

The little Ardennois was a_ beautiful 
child, with dark, grave, tender eyes, and 
a lovely bloom upon his face, and fair 
locks that clustered to his throat; and 
many an artist sketched the group as it 
went by him —the green cart with the 
brass flagons of Teniers and Mieris and 
Van Tal, and the great, tawny-colored, 
massive dog, with his belled harness that 
chimed cheerily as he went, and the small 
figure that ran beside him, which had little 
white feet in great wooden shoes, and a 
soft, grave, innocent, happy face like the 
little fair children of Rubens. 

Nello and Patrasche did the work so 
well and so joyfully together that Jehan 
Daas himself, when the summer came and 
he was better again, had no need to stir 
out, but could sit in the doorway in the 
sun and see them go forth through the 


A DOG OF FLANDERS. 23 


garden wicket, and then doze and dream 
and pray a little, and then awake again as 
the clock tolled three, and watch for their 
return. And on their return Patrasche 
would shake himself free of his harness 
with a bay of glee, and Nello would re- 
count with pride the doings of the day; | 
and they would all go in together to their 
meal of rye bread and milk or soup, and 
would see the shadows lengthen over the 
great plain, and see the twilight veil the 
fair cathedral spire; and then le down 
together to sleep peacefully while the old 
man said a prayer. 

So the days and the years went on, 
and the lives of Nello and Patrasche 
were happy, innocent and healthful. | 

In the spring and summer especially 
were they glad. Flanders is not a lovely 
land, and around the burgh of Rubens it_ 
is perhaps least lovely of all. Corn and 
colza, pasture and plough, succeed each 
other on the characterless plain in weary- 
ing repetition, and, save by some gaunt 
gray tower, with its peal of pathetic bells, 





Mal oy 


fen 
as 


ox shen 


TL, 
tif), 
f 
Me \ SAWee ally t 
Y 







24 A DOG OF FLANDERS. 


or some figure coming athwart the fields, 
made picturesque by a gleaner’s bundle or 
a woodman’s fagot, there is no change, no 
variety, no beauty any- 
where; and he who has 
dwelt upon the moun- 
tains or amidst the for: 
ests feels oppressed as 
by imprisonment with 
the tedium and the 
endlessness of that 
vast and dreary levei. 
But it is green and 


eC Se very fertile, and it has 


wide horizons that have 
a certain charm of their own even in their 
dulness and monotony; and amongst the 
rushes by the water-side the flowers grow, 
and the trees rise tall and fresh where the 
barges glide with their great hulks black 
against the sun, and their little green bar- 
rels and vari-colored flags gay against the 
leaves. Anyway, there is greenery and 
breadth of space enough to be as good 
as beauty to a child and a dog; and these 


A DOG OF FLANDERS. 25 


two asked no better, when their work was 
done, than to lie buried in the lush grasses 
on the side of the canal, and watch the 
cumbrous vessels drift- 
ing by and bringing 
the crisp salt smell 
of the sea amongst 
the blossoming scents 
of the country sum- 
met. 

irae, in the winter 
fewas harder, and 
they had to rise in the darkness and the 
bitter cold, and they had seldom as much 
as they could have eaten any day, and 
the hut was scarce better than a shed 
when the nights were cold, although it 
looked so pretty in warm weather, buried 
in a great kindly-clambering vine, that 
never bore fruit, indeed, but which cov- 
ered it with luxuriant green tracery all 
through the months of blossom and har- 
vest. In winter the winds found many 
holes in the walls of the poor little hut, 
and the vine was black and leafless, and 





26 A DOG OF FLANDERS. 


the bare lands looked very bleak and 
drear without, and sometimes within the 
floor was flooded and then frozen. In 
winter it was hard, and the snow numbed 
the little white limbs of Nello, and the 
icicles cut the brave, untiring feet of 
Patrasche. 

But even then they were never heard 
to lament, either of them. The child’s 
wooden shoes and the dog’s four legs 
would trot manfully .together over the 
frozen fields to the chime of the bells on 
the harness; and then sometimes, in the 
streets of Antwerp, some housewife would 
bring them a bowl of soup and a hand- 
ful of bread, or some kindly trader would 
throw some billets of fuel into the little 
cart as it went homeward, or some woman 
in their own village would bid them keep 
some share of the milk they carried for 
their own food; and then they would run 
over the white lands, through the early 
darkness, bright and happy, and burst with 
a shout of joy into their home. 

So, on the whole, it was well with them, 


A DOG OF FLANDERS. 27. 


very well; and Patrasche, meeting on the 
highway or in the public streets the many 
dogs who toiled from daybreak into night- 
fall, paid only with blows and curses, and 

















































































































































































































loosened from the shafts with a kick to 
starve and freeze as best they might, — 
Patrasche in his heart was very grateful to 
his fate, and thought it the fairest and the 
‘indhiest the world could hold. Though 


26 A DOG Of FLANDERS 

he was often very hungry indeed when he 
lay down at night; though he had to work 
in the heats of summer noons and the 
rasping chills of winter dawns; though 
his feet were often tender with wounds 
from the sharp edges of the Jagged pave: 
ment; though he had to perform tasks be: 
yond his strength and against his nature, 
—yet he was grateful and content: he did 
his duty with each day, and the eyes that 
he loved smiled down on him. It was 
sufficient for Patrasche. 

There was only one thing which caused 
Patrasche any uneasiness in his life, and 
it was this. Antwerp, as all the world 
knows, is full at every turn of old piles 
of stones, dark and ancient and majestic, 
standing in crooked courts, jammed against 
gateways and taverns, rising by the water’s 
edge, with bells ringing above them in the 
air, and ever and again out of their arched 
doors a swell of music pealing. There 
they remain, the grand old sanctuaries of 
the past, shut in amidst the squalor, the 
hurry, the crowds, the unloveliness and the 


A DOG OF FLANDERS. 29 


commerce of the modern world, and all 
day long the clouds drift and the birds 
circle and the winds sigh 
around them, and _ be- 


neath the earth at their a 
feet there sleeps— Rv- Neh 
BENS, pre 









| | Hy i a a 
And the greatness of — rl Ne ETN eM hel 
the mighty Master still a (i ma li | 
il WANs 
pm) WUT A: 
a 8 
Naa 4 pu es 


te waye 


rests upon Antwerp, and 3 li 
wherever we turn in its ’ 
narrow streets his glory 
lies therein, so that all | 
mean things are thereby 
transfigured; and as we pace slowly through 
the winding ways, and by the edge of the 
stagnant water, and through the noisome 













i . 


30 A DOG OF FLANDERS. 


courts, his spirit abides with us, and the 
heroic beauty of his visions is about us, 
and the stones that once felt his footsteps 
and bore his shadow seem to arise and 
speak of him with living voices. For the 
city which 1s the tomb of Rubens still lives 
to us through him, and him alone. 

It is so quiet there by that great white 
sepulchre — so quiet, save only when the 
organ peals and the choir cries aloud the 
Salve Regina or the Kyrie Eleison. Sure 
no artist ever had a greater gravestone 
than that pure marble sanctuary gives to 
him in the heart of his birthplace in the 
chancel of St. Jacques. 

Without Rubens, what were Antwerp? 
A dirty, dusky, bustling mart which no 
man would ever care to look upon save 
the traders who do business on its wharves. 
With Rubens, to the whole world of men 
it is a sacred name, a sacred soil, a Bethle- 
hem where a god of Art saw light, a Gol- 
gotha where a god of Art lies dead. 

O nations! closely should you treasure 
your great men, for by them alone will 


A DOG OF FLANDERS. 31 


the future know of you. Flanders in her 
generations has been wise. In his life she 
glorified this greatest of her sons, and in 
his death she magnifies his name. But 
her wisdom is very rare. 

Now, the trouble of Patrasche was this. 
Into these great, sad piles of stones, that 
reared their melancholy majesty above the 
crowded roofs, the child Nello would many 
and many a time enter, and disappear 
through their dark, arched portals, whilst 
Patrasche, left without upon the pavement, 
would wearily and vainly ponder on what 
could be the charm which thus allured from 
him his inseparable and beloved companion. 
Once or twice he did essay to see for him- 
self, clattering up the steps with his milk- 
cart behind him; but thereon he had been 
always sent back again summarily bya tall 
custodian in black clothes and silver chains 
of office; and fearful of bringing his little 
master into trouble, he desisted, and re- 
mained couched patiently before the 
churches until such time as the boy re- 
appeared. It was not the fact of his going 






32 A DOG OF FLANDERS. 


into them which disturbed Patrasche: he 
knew that people went to church: all the 
village went to the small, tumbledown, gray 
pile opposite the red windmill. What 
troubled him was that little Nello always 
looked strangely when he came out, 
~ always very flushed or very pale; and 
whenever he returned home after such 
visitations would sit silent and dream- 
ing, not caring to play, but 
S.% gazing out at the evening 
- skies beyond the line of the 
canal, very subdued and 
almost sad. 

What was it? wondered Patrasche. He 
thought it could not be good or natural 
for the little lad to be so grave, and in his 
dumb fashion he tried all he could to keep 
Nello by him in the sunny fields or in the 
busy market-place. But to the churches 
Nello would go: most often of all would 
he go to the great cathedral; and Patrasche, 
left without on the stones by the iron frag- 
ments of Quentin Matsys’ gate, would 
stretch himself and yawn and sigh, and 


A DOG OF FLANDERS. a3 


even howl now and then, all in vain, until 
the doors closed, and the child perforce 
came forth again, and winding his arms 
about the dog’s neck would kiss him on his 











{tu 


Rota, o ’ u . 


ry \ \ 
= “Wig 2 
5 ve 
VN ses us Wy. 4, 


‘lo ag ia in 
: Mey 4 Ul wo 


Ve it 





, ey 2 th 
AH Pan 
a 


broad, tawny-colored forehead, and murmur 
always the same words: “If I could only 
see them, Patrasche!—if I could only see 


12 


them! 
What were they? pondered Patrasche, 


34 A DOG OF FLANDERS. 


looking up with large, wistful, sympathetic 
eyes. 

One day, when the custodian was out of 
the way and the doors left ajar, he got in 
for a moment after his little friend and saw. 
“They” were two great covered pictures 
on either side of the choir. 

Nello was kneeling, rapt as in an ecstasy, 
before the altar-picture of the Assumption, 
and when he noticed Patrasche, and rose 
and drew the dog gently out into the air, 
his face was wet with tears, and he looked 
up at the veiled places as he passed them, 
and murmured to his companion, “ It is so 
terrible not to see them, Patrasche, just 
because one is poor and cannot pay! He 
never meant that the poor should not see 
them when he painted them, I am sure. 
He would have had us see them any day, 
every day: that lamsure. And they keep 
them shrouded there—shrouded in the 
dark, the beautiful things!—and_ they 
never feel the light, and no eyes look on 
them, unless rich people come and pay. If 
I could only see them, I would be content 
to. die” 


A DOG OF FLANDERS. 35 


But he could not see them, and Patrasche 
could not help him, for to gain the silver 
piece that the church exacts as the price 
for looking on the glories of the Elevation 
of the Cross and the Descent of the Cross 
was a thing as utterly beyond the powers 
of either of them as it would have been to 
scale the heights of the cathedral spire. 
They had never so much as a sou to 
spare: if they cleared enough to get a 
little wood for the stove, a little broth for 
the pot, it was the utmost they could do. 
And yet the heart of the child was set in 
sore and endless longing upon beholding 
the greatness of the two veiled Rubens. 

The whole soul of the little Ardennois 
thrilled and stirred with an absorbing pas- 
sion for Art. Going on his ways through 
the old city in the early days before the 
sun or the people had risen, Nello, who 
looked only a little peasant-boy, with a 
great dog drawing milk to sell from door 
to door, was in a heaven of dreams whereof 
Rubens was the god. Nello, cold and hun- 
gry, with stockingless feet in wooden shoes, 


36 A DOG OF FLANDERS. 





and the winter winds blowing amongst his 
curls and lifting his poor thin garments, 
was in a rapture of meditation, wherein 
all that he saw was the beautiful fair face 


A DOG OF FLANDERS. ey) 


of the Mary of the Assumption, with the 
waves of her golden hair lying upon her 
shoulders, and the light of an eternal 
sun shining down upon her brow. Nello, 
reared in poverty, and buffeted by fortune, 
and untaught in letters, and unheeded by 
men, had the compensation or the curse 
which is called Genius. 

No one knew it. He as little as any. 
No one knew it. Only indeed Patrasche, 
who, being with him always, saw him 
draw with chalk upon the stones any and 
every thing that grew or breathed, heard 
him on his little bed of hay murmur all 
manner of timid, pathetic prayers to the 
spirit of the great Master; watched his 
gaze darken and his face radiate at the 
evening glow of sunset or the rosy rising 
of the dawn; and felt many and many a 
time the tears of a strange, nameless pain 
and joy, mingled together, fall hotly from 
the bright young eyes upon his own 
wrinkled, yellow forehead. 

“J should go to my grave quite con- 
tent if I thought, Nello, that when thou 


38 A DOG OF FLANDERS. 


growest a man thou couldst own this hu 
and the little plot of ground, and labor 
for thyself, and be called Baas by thy 
neighbors,” said the old man Jehan many 
an hour from his bed. For to own a bit - 
of soil, and to be called Baas — master — 
by the hamlet round, is to have achieved 
the highest ideal of a Flemish peasant; 
and the old soldier, who had wandered 
over all the earth in his youth, and had 
brought nothing back, deemed in his old 
age that to live and die on one spot in 
contented humility was the fairest fate he 
could desire for his darling. But Nello 
said nothing. 

The same leaven was working in him 
that in other times begat Rubens and 
Jordaens and the Van Eycks, and all 
their wondrous tribe, and in times more 
recent begat in the green country of the 
Ardennes, where the Meuse washes the 
old walls of Dijon, the great artist of 
the Patroclus, whose genius is too near 
us for us aright to measure its divinity. 

Nello dreamed of other things in the 


A DOG OF FLANDERS. 39 


future than of tilling the little rood of 
earth, and living under the wattle roof, 
and being called Baas by neighbors a 
little poorer or a little less poor than 
himself. The cathedral spire, where it 
rose beyond the fields in the ruddy even- 
ing skies or in the dim, gray, misty morn- 
ings, said other things to him than this. 
But these he told only to Patrasche, whis- 
pering, childlike, his fancies in the dog’s 
ear when they went together at their 
work through the fogs of the daybreak, 
or lay together at their rest amongst the 
rustling rushes by the water’s side. 

For such dreams are not easily shaped 
into speech to awake the slow sympathies 
of human auditors; and they would only 
have sorely perplexed and troubled the 
poor old man bedridden in his corner, 
who, for his part, whenever he: had trod- 
den the streets of Antwerp, had thought 
the daub of blue and red that they called 
a Madonna, on the walls of the wine-shop 
where he drank his sou’s worth of black 
beer, quite as good as any of the famous 


40 A DOG OF FLANDERS. 


altar-pieces for which the stranger folk 
traveled far and wide into Flanders from 
every land on which the good sun snone. 

There was only one other beside Pa- 
trasche to whom Nello could talk at all of 
his daring fantasies. This 
other was little Alois, who 
lived at the old red mill on 
the grassy mound, and whose 
father, the miller, was the 
best-to-do husbandman in ali 
the village. Little Alois was 
only a pretty baby with soft 
round, rosy features, made lovely by those 
sweet dark eyes that the Spanish rule has 
left in so many a Flemish face, in testi- 
mony of the Alvan dominion, as Spanish 
art has left broadsown throughout the 
country majestic palaces and stately courts, 
gilded house-fronts and sculptured lintels 
—histories in blazonry and poems in 
stone. 

Little Alois was often with Nello and 
Patrasche. They played in the fields, they 
ran in the snow, they gathered the daisies 





A DOG OF FLANDERS. 4I 


and bilberries, they went up to the old 
gray church together, and they often sat 
together by the broad wood-fire in the mill- 
house. Little Alois, indeed, was the rich- 
est child in the hamlet. She had neither 
brother nor sister; her blue serge dress 
had never a hole in it; at kermesse she 
had as many gilded nuts and Agni Dei in 
sugar as her hands could hold; and when 
she went up for her first communion her 
flaxen curls were covered with a cap of 
richest Mechlin lace, which had been her 
mother’s and her grandmother’s before it 
came to her. Men spoke already, though 
she had but twelve years, of the 
good wife she would be for their 
sons to woo and win; but she 
herself was a little gay, simple 
child, in nowise conscious of 
her heritage, and she loved no . 
playfellows so well as Jehan 
Daas’ grandson and his dog. 
One day her father, Baas Cogez, a good 
man, but somewhat stern, came on a pretty 
group in the long meadow behind the mill, 





42 A DOG OF FLANDERS. 


where the aftermath had that day beer 
cut. It was his little daughter sitting 
amidst the hay, with the great tawny head 
of Patrasche on her lap, and many wreaths 





of poppies and blue cornflowers round 
them both: on a clean smooth slab of 
pine wood the boy Nello drew their like- 
ness with a stick of charcoal. 

The miller stood and looked at the 
portrait with tears in his eyes, it was so 


A DOG OF FLANDERS. 43 


strangely like, and he loved his only child 
closely and well. Then he roughly chid 
the little girl for idling there whilst her 
mother needed her within, and sent her 
indoors crying and afraid: then, turning, 
he snatched the wood from Nello’s hands. 
“ Dost do much of such folly?” he asked, 
but there was a tremble in his voice. 
Nello colored and hung his head. “I 
draw everything I see,” he murmured. 
The miller was silent: then he stretched 
his hand out with a franc in it. ‘It is 
folly, as I say, and evil waste of time: 
nevertheless, it is like Alois, and will 
please the house-mother. Take this sil- 
ver bit for it and leave it for me.” 
‘iescolor died out of the face of the 
young Ardennois: he lifted his head and 
put his hands behind his back. “ Keep 
your money and the portrait both, Baas 
‘Cogez,” he said simply. ‘‘ You have been 
often good to me.” ‘Then he called Pa- 
trasche to him, and walked away across 
the fields. 
“T could have seen them with that 


AA A DOG OF FLANDERS. 


franc,’ he murmured to Patrasche, “but 
I could not sell her picture—not even 
for them.” 

Baas Cogez went into his mill-house 
sore troubled in his mind. “That lad 
must not be so much with Alois,” he said 
to his wife that night. “ Trouble may 
come of it hereafter: he is fifteen now, 
and she is twelve; and the boy is comely 
of face and form.” 

“And he is a good lad and 
a loyal,” said the housewife, 
feasting her eyes on the piece 
of pine wood where it was 
_throned above the chimney 

with a cuckoo clock in oak 

and a Calvary in wax. 

“Yea, I do not gainsay that,” said the 
miller, draining his pewter flagon. 

“ Then, if what you think of were ever 
. to come to pass,” said the wife, hesitat- 
ingly, “would it matter so much? She 
will have enough for both, and one can- 
not be better than happy.” 

“You are a woman, and therefore a 





A DOG OF FLANDERS. 45 


fool,” said the miller harshly, striking his 
pipe on the table. “The lad is naught 
but a beggar, and, with these painter's 
fancies, worse than a beggar. Have a 
care that they are not together in the 
future, or I will send the child to the 
surer keeping of the nuns of the Sacred 
Peart.” 

The poor mother was terrified, and 
promised humbly to do his will. Not 
that she could bring herself altogether to 
separate the child from her favorite play- 
mate, nor did the miller even desire that 
extreme of cruelty to a young lad who 
was guilty of nothing except poverty. But 
there were many ways in which little Alois 
was kept away from her chosen compan- 
ion; and Nello being a boy proud and 
quiet and sensitive, was quickly wounded, 
and ceased to turn his own steps and 
those of Patrasche, as he had been used 
to do with every moment of leisure, to 
the old red mill upon the slope. What 
his offence was he did not know: he sup- 
posed he had in some manner angered 


46 A DOG OF FLANDERS. 


Baas Cogez by taking the portrait of Alois 
in the meadow; and when the child who 
loved him would run to him and nestle 
her hand in his, he would smile at her 
very sadly and say with a tender concern 
for her before himself, “ Nay, Alois, do not 
anger your father. He thinks that I make 
you idle, dear, and he is not pleased that 
you should be with me. He is a good 
man and loves you well: we will not 
anger him, Alois.” : 

But it was with a sad heart that he said 
it, and the earth did not look so bright to 
him as it had used to do when he went 
out at sunrise under the poplars down the 
straight roads with Patrasche. The old 
red mill had been a landmark to him, and 
he had been used to pause by it, going 
and coming, for a cheery greeting with its 
people as her little flaxen head rose above 
the low mill-wicket, and her little rosy 
_hands had held out a bone or a crust to 
Patrasche. Now the dog looked wistfully 
at a closed door, and the boy went on 
without pausing, with a pang at his heart, 


A DOG OF FLANDERS. 47 


and the child sat within, with tears drop- 
ping slowly on the knitting to which she 
was set, on her little stool by the stove; 
and Baas Cogez, working among his sacks 
and his mill-gear, would harden his will 
and say to himself, “It is best so. The 
lad is all but a beggar, and full of idle, 
dreaming fooleries. Who knows what 
mischief might not come of it in the fut- 
ure?” So he was wise in his generation, 
and would not have the door unbarred, 
except upon rare and formal occasions, 
which seemed to have neither warmth nor 
mirth in them to the two children, who 
had been accustomed so long to a daily 
gleeful, careless, happy interchange of 
greeting, speech and pastime, with no 
other watcher of their sports or auditor of 
their fancies than Patrasche, sagely shak- 
ing the brazen bells of his collar and 
responding with all a dog’s swift sym- 
pathies to their every change of mood. 
All this while the little panel of pine 
wood remained over the chimney in the 
mill-kitchen with the cuckoo clock and 


48 A DOG OF FLANDERS. 


the waxen Calvary, and sometimes it 
seemed to Nello a little hard that whilst 
his gift was accepted he himself should 
be denied. 

But he did not complain: it was his 
habit to be quiet: old Jehan Daas had 
said ever to him, “ We are poor: we must 
take what God sends—the ill with the 
good: the poor cannot choose.” 

To which the boy had always listened 
in silence, being reverent of his old grand- 
father; but nevertheless a certain vague, 
sweet hope, such as beguiles the children 
of genius, had whispered in his heart, 
“Yet the poor do choose sometimes — 
choose to be great, so that men cannot 
say them nay.” And he thought so still 
in his innocence; and one day, when the 
little Alois, finding him by chance alone 
amongst the corn-fields by the canal, ran 
to him and held him close, and sobbed 
piteously because the morrow would be 
her saint’s day, and for the first time in 
all her life her parents had failed to bid 
him to the little supper and romp in the 


A DOG OF FLANDERS. 49 


great barns with which her feast-day was 
always celebrated, Nello had kissed her 
and murmured to her in firm faith, “ It 


Bi if 


i 
y 





shall be different one day, Alois. One 
day that little bit. of pine wood that your 
father has of mine shall be worth its 


50 A DOG OF FLANDERS. 


weight in silver; and he will not shut 
the door against me then. Only love me 
always, dear little Alois, only love me 
always, and I will be great.” 

“ And if I do not love you?” the pretty 
child asked, pouting a little through her 
tears, and moved by the instinctive coquet- 
ries of her sex. | 

Nello’s eyes left her face and wandered 
to the distance, where in the red and gold 
of the Flemish night the cathedral spire 
rose. There was a smile on his face so 
sweet and yet so sad that little Alois was 
awed by it. “I will be great still,” he 
said under his breath — “great still, or 
die: Alois,” : 

“Vou do not love me,” said the little 
spoilt child, pushing him away; but the 
boy shook his head and smiled, and went 
on his way through the tall yellow corn, 
seeing as in a vision some day in a fair 
future when he should come into that old 
familiar land and ask Alois of her people, 
and be not refused or denied, but received 
in honor, whilst the village folk should ° 


A DOG OF FLANDERS. 51 


throng to look upon him and say in one 
another’s ears, “ Dost see him? Heisa 
king among men, for he is a great artist 
and the world speaks his name; and yet 
he was only our poor little Nello, who 
was a beggar, as one may Say, and only 
got his bread by the help of his dog.” 
And he thought how he would fold his 
grandsire in furs and purples, and _por- 
tray him as the old man is portrayed in 
the Family in the chapel of St. Jacques; 
and of how he would hang the throat 
of Patrasche with a collar of gold, and 
place him on his right hand, and say to 
the people, “ This was once my only 
friend;” and of how he would build him- 
self a great white marble palace, and make 
to himself luxuriant gardens of pleasure, 
on the slope looking outward to where 
the cathedral spire rose, and not dwell in 
it himself, but summon to it, as to a home, 
all men young and poor and friendless, 
but of the will to do mighty things; and 
of how he would say to them always, if 
they sought to bless his name, “ Nay, do 


C2 A DOG OF FLANDERS. 


~~ 


not thank me—thank Rubens. Without 
him, what should I have been?” And 
these dreams, beautiful, impossible, inno- 
cent, free of all selfishness, full of heroical 











worship, were so closely about him as he 
went that he was happy — happy even on 
this sad anniversary of Alois’ saint’s day, 
when he and Patrasche went home by 
themselves to the little dark hut and the 


A DOG OF FLANDERS. 53 


meal of black bread, whilst in the mill- 
house all the children of the village sang 
and laughed, and ate the big round cakes 
of Dijon and the almond gingerbread of 
Brabant, and danced in the great barn to 
the lhght of the stars and the music of 
flute and fiddle. 

“Never mind, Patrasche,” he said, with 
his arms round the dog’s neck as they 
both sat in the door of the hut, where 
the sounds of the mirth at the mill came 
down to them on the night air— “ never 
mind. It shall all be changed by and 
by.” 
He believed in the future: Patrasche. 
of more experience and of more philoso- 
phy, thought that the loss of the mill 
supper in the present was ill compensated 
by dreams of milk and honey in some 
vague hereafter. And Patrasche growled 
whenever he passed by Baas Cogez. 

“This is Alois’ name-day, is it not?” 
said the old man Daas that night from 
the corner where he was stretched upon 
his bed of sacking. 


54 A DOG OF FLANDERS. 


The bov gave a gesture of assent: he 
wished that the old man’s memory had 
erred a little, instead of keeping such sure 
account. 

“And why not there?” his grandfather 
pursued. “Thou hast never missed a 
year before, Nello.” 

“Thou art too sick to leave,” murmured 
the lad, bending his handsome young head 
over the bed. 

“Tut! tut! Mother Nulette would have 
come and sat with me, as she does scores 
of times. What is the cause, Nello?” the 
old man persisted. “Thou surely hast 
not had ill words with the little one?” 

“Nay, grandfather —never,’ said the boy 
quickly, with a hot color in his bent face. 
“Simply and truly, Baas Cogez did not 
have me asked this year. He has taken 
some whim against me.” 

“But thou hast done nothing wrong?” 

“That I know—nothing. I took the 
portrait of Alois on a piece of pine: that 
is all.” 

“Ah!” The old man was silent: the 


A DOG OF FLANDERS. 55 


truth suggested itself to him with the 
boy’s innocent answer. He was tied to a 
bed of dried leaves in the corner of a 
wattle hut, but he had not wholly for- 
gotten what the ways of the world were 
like. 

He drew Nello’s fair head fondly to his 
breast with a tenderer gesture. “Thou 
art very poor, my child,” he said with a 
quiver the more in his aged, trembling 
voice —“so poor! It is very hard for 
thee.” 

“Nay, I am rich,” murmured Nello; 
and in his innocence he thought so— 
rich with the imperishable powers that 
are mightier than the might of kings. 
And he went and stood by the door of 
the hut in the quiet autumn night, and 
watched the stars troop by and the tall 
poplars bend and shiver in the wind. All 
the casements of the mill-house were 
lighted, and every now and then the notes 
Spine tite came to him. - The tears fell 
down his cheeks, for he was but a child, 
yet he smiled, for he said to himself, “ In 


56 A DOG OF FLANDERS. 


the future!” He stayed there vatil all 
was quite still and dark, then he and 
Patrasche went within and slept together, 
long and deeply, side by side. 

Now he had a secret which only Pa- 
trasche knew. There was a little out- 
house to the hut, which no one entered 
but himself —a dreary place, but with 
abundant clear light from the north. 
Here he had fashioned himself rudely 
an easel in rough lumber, and here, on 
a great gray sea of stretched paper, he 
had given shape to one of the innumer- 
able fancies which possessed his brain. 
No one had ever taught him anything; 
colors he had no means to buy; he had 
gone without bread many a time to pro- 
cure even the few rude vehicles that he 
had here; and it was only in black or 
white that he could fashion the things 
he saw. This great figure.which he had 
drawn here in chalk was only an old man 
sitting on a fallen tree—only that. He 
had seen old Michel the woodman sitting 
so at evening many a time. He had neve: 


A DOG OF FLANDERS. 57 


'ad a soul to tell him of outline or per- 
spective, of anatomy or of shadow, and yet 
he had given all the weary, worn out age, . 
all the sad, quiet patience, all the rugged, 
careworn pathos of his original, and given 
them so that the old, lonely figure was a 
poem, sitting there, meditative and alone, 
on the dead tree, with the darkness of the 
descending night behind him. 

It was rude, of course, in a way, and 
had many faults, no doubt; and yet it was 
real, true in Nature, true in Art, and very 
mournful, and in a manner beautiful. 

Patrasche had lain quiet countless hours 
watching its gradual creation after the la- 
bor of each day was done, and he knew 
that Nello had a hope — vain and wild, 
perhaps, but strongly cherished — of send- 
ing this great drawing to compete for a 
prize of two hundred francs a year, which 
it was announced in Antwerp would be 
open to every lad of talent, scholar or 
peasant, under eighteen, who would at- 
tempt to win it with some unaided work 


of chalk or pencil. Three of the fore- 


58 A DOG OF FLANDERS. 


most artists in the town of Rubens were 
to be the judges and elect the victor 
according to his merits. 

All the spring and sum- 
mer and autumn Nello had 
been at work upon this 
treasure, which, if trium- 
phant, would build him 
his first step toward in- 
dependence and the mys- 
teries of the art which he 
blindly, ignorantly, and yet 
passionately adored. 

He said nothing to any one: his grand- 
father would not have understood, and little 
Alois was lost to him. Only to Patrasche 
he told all, and whispered, ‘‘ Rubens would 
give it me, I think, if he knew.” 

Patrasche thought so too, for he knew 
that Rubens had loved dogs or he had 
never painted them with such exquisite 
fidelity ; and men who loved dogs were, as 
Patrasche knew, always pitiful. 

The drawings were to go in on the first 
day of December, and the decision be given 








A DOG OF FLANDERS. 59 


on the twenty-fourth, so that he who should 
win might rejoice with all his people at the 
Christmas season. 

In the twilight of a bitter wintry day, 
and with a beating heart, now quick with 
hope, now faint with fear, Nello placed the 
great picture on his little, green milk-cart, 
and took it, with the help of Patrasche, 
into the town, and there left it, as enjoined, 
at the doors of a public building. 

“Perhaps it 1s worth nothing at all. 
How can [| tell?” he thought, with the 
heart-sickness of a great timidity. Now 
that he had left it there, it seemed to him 
so hazardous, so vain, so foolish, to dream 
that he, a little lad with bare feet, who 
barely knew his letters, could do anything 
at which great painters, real artists, could 
ever deign to look. Yet he took heart as 
he went by the cathedral: the lordly form 
of Rubens seemed to rise from the fog and 
the darkness, and to loom in its magnifi- 
cence before him, whilst the lips, with their 
kindly smile, seemed to him to murmur, 
“Nay, have courage! It was not by a weak 


60 4 DOG OF FLANDERS. 


heart and by faint fears that I wrote my 
name for all time upon Antwerp.” 

Nello ran home through the cold night, 
comforted. He had done his best: the 
rest must be as God willed, he thought, in 
that innocent, unquestioning faith which 
had been taught him in the little gray 
chapel amongst the willows and the poplar 
ireCS: 

The winter was very sharp already. 
That night, after they reached the hut, 
snow fell; and fell for very many days after 
that, so that the paths and the divisions in 
the fields were all obliterated, and all the 
smaller streams were frozen over, and the 
cold was intense upon the plains. Then, 
indeed, it became hard work to go round 
for the milk while the world was all dark, 
and carry it through the darkness to the 
silent town. Hard work, especially for 
Patrasche, for the passage of the years, 
that were only bringing Nello a stronger 
youth, were bringing him old age, and his 
joints were stiff, and his bones ached often. 
But he would never give up his share of 


A DOG OF FLANDERS. 61 


the labor. Nello would fain have spared 
him and drawn the cart himself, but Pa- 
trasche would not allow it. All he would 
ever permit or accept was the help of a 
thrust from behind to the truck, as it lum- 
bered along through the ice-ruts. Patrasche 
had lived in harness, and he was proud of 
it. He suffered a great deal sometimes 
from frost, and the terrible roads, and the 
rheumatic pains of his limbs, but he only 
drew his breath hard and bent his stout 
neck, and trod onward with steady pa- 
tience. 

“Rest thee at home, Patrasche —it is 
time thou didst rest — and I can quite well 
push in the cart by myself,” urged Nello 
many a morning; but Patrasche, who un- 
derstood him aright, would no more have 
consented to stay at home than a veteran 
soldier to shirk when the charge was sound- 
ing; and every day he would rise and place 
himself in his shafts, and plod along over 
the snow through the fields that his four 
round feet had left their print upon so 
many, many years. 


62 A DOG OF FLANDERS. 


“One must never rest till one dies,” 
thought Patrasche; andsometimes itseemed 
to him that that time of rest for him was 
not very far off. His sight was less clear 
than it had been, and it gave him pain 
to rise after the night’s sleep, though he 
would never lie a moment in his straw 
when once the bell of the chapel tolling 
five let him know that the daybreak of 
labor had begun. 

“My poor Patrasche, we shall soon lie 
quiet together, you and I,” said old Jehan 
Daas, stretching out to stroke the head of 
Patrasche with the old, withered hand which 
had always shared with him its one poor 
crust of bread; and the hearts of the old: 
man and the old dog ached together with 
one thought: When they were gone, who 
would care for their darling? | 

One afternoon, as they came back from 
Antwerp over the snow, which had become 
hard and smooth as marble over all the 
Flemish plains, they found dropped in the 
road a pretty little puppet, a tambourine- 
player, all scarlet and gold, about six 


A DOG OF FLANDERS. 63 


inches high, and, unlike greater person- 
ages when Fortune lets them drop, quite 
unspoiled and unhurt by its fall. It was 
a pretty toy. Nello tried to find its owner, 





and, failing, thought that it was just the 
thing to please Alois. 

It was quite night when he passed the 
mill-house: he knew the little window 
of her room. It could be no harm, he 


64 A DOG OF FLANDERS. 


thought, if he gave her his little piece of 
treasure-trove, they had been play-fellows 
so long. ‘There was a shed with a sloping 
roof beneath her casement: he climbed it 
and tapped softly at the lattice: there was 
a little light within. The child opened it 
and looked out, half frightened. 

Nello put the tambourine-player into 
her hands. ‘‘ Here is a doll I found in 
the snow, Alois. Take it,’ he whispered 
— “take it, and God bless thee, dear! ” 

He slid down from the shed-roof before 
she had time to thank him, and ran off 
through the darkness. 

That night there was a fire at the mill. 
Out-buildings and much corn were de- 
stroyed, although the mill itself and the 
dwelling-house were unharmed. All the 
village was out in terror, and engines 
came tearing through the snow from 
Antwerp. The miller was insured, and 
would lose nothing: nevertheless, he was 
in furious wrath, and declared aloud that 
the fire was due to no accident, but to 
some foul intent. 


A DOG OF FLANDERS. 65 


Nello, awakened from his sleep, ran to 
help with the rest: Baas Cogez thrust him 
angrily aside. “Thou wert loitering here 
after dark,” he said roughly. “I believe, 
on my soul, that thou dost know more of 
the fire than any one.” 

Nello heard him in silence, stupefied, 
not supposing that any one could say 
such things except in jest, and not com- 
prehending how any one could pass a jest 
at such a time. 

Nevertheless, the miller said the brutal 
thing openly to many of his neighbors 
in the day that followed; and though no 
serious charge was ever preferred against 
the lad, it got bruited about that Nello 
had been seen in the mill-yard after dark 
on some unspoken errand, and that he 
bore Baas Cogez a grudge for forbidding 
his intercourse with little Alois; and so 
the hamlet, which followed the sayings of 
its richest landowner servilely, and whose 
families all hoped to secure the riches of 
Alois in some future time for their sons, 
took the hint to give grave looks and cold 


66 A DOG OF FLANDERS. 


words to old Jehan Daas’ grandson. No 
one said anything to him openly, but all 
the village agreed together to humor the 
miller’s prejudice, and at the cottages and 
farms where Nello and Patrasche called 
every morning for the milk for Antwerp, 
downcast glances and brief phrases re- 
placed to them the broad smiles and 
cheerful greetings to which they had been 
always used. No one really credited the 
millers absurd suspicion, nor the outra- 
geous accusations born of them, but the 
people were all very poor and very igno- 
rant, and the one rich man of the place 
had pronounced against him. Nello, in 
his innocence and his friendlessness, had 
no strength to stem the popular tide. 

“Thou art very cruel to the ag. ste 
miller’s wife dared to say, weeping, to her 
lord. ‘‘Sure he is an innocent lad anda 
faithful, and would never dream of any 
such wickedness, however sore his heart 
might be.” 

But Baas Cogez being an obstinate man, 
having once said a thing held to it dog- 


A DOG OF FLANDERS. 67 


gedly, though in his innermost soul he 
knew well the injustice that he was com- 
mitting. 

Meanwhile, Nello endured the injury 
done against him with a certain proud 
patience that disdained to complain: he 
only gave way a little when he was quite 
alone with old Patrasche. Besides, he 
thought, “If it should -vin! They will be 
sorry then, perhaps.” 

Still, to a boy not quite sixteen, and 
who had dwelt in one little world all 
his short life, and in his childhood had 
been caressed and applauded on all sides, 
it was a hard trial to have the whole of 
that little world turn against him for 
naught. Especially hard in that bleak, 
snow-bound, famine-stricken winter-time, 
when the only light and warmth there 
could be found abode beside the village 
hearths and in the kindly greetings of 
neighbors. In the winter-time all drew 
nearer to each other, all to all, except to 
Nello and Patrasche, with whom none 
now would have anything to do, and who 


68 A DOG OF FLANDERS. 


were left to fare as they might with the 
old paralyzed, bedridden man in the little 
cabin, whose fire was often low, and whose 
board was often without bread, for there 
was a buyer from Antwerp who had taken 
to drive his mule in of a day for the milk 
of the various dairies, and there were only 
three or four of the people who had re- 
fused his terms of purchase and remained 
faithful to the little green cart. So that 
the burden which Patrasche drew had 
become very light, and the centime-pieces 
in Nello’s pouch had become, alas! very 
small likewise. 

The dog would stop, as usual, at all the 
familiar gates which were now closed to 
him, and look up at them with wistful, 
mute appeal; and it cost the neighbors a 
pang to shut their doors and their hearts, 
and let Patrasche draw his cart on again, 
empty. Nevertheless, they did it, for they 
desired to please Baas Cogez. 

Noél was close at hand. 

The weather was very wild and cold. 
The snow was six feet deep, and the ice 


A DOG OF FLANDERS. 69 


was firm enough to bear oxen and men 
upon it everywhere. At this season the 
little village was always gay and cheerful. 
At the poorest dwelling there were possets 
and cakes, joking and dancing, sugared 
saints and gilded Jésus. The merry 
Flemish bells jingled everywhere on the 
horses; everywhere within doors some 
well-filled soup-pot sang and smoked over 
the stove; and everywhere over the snow 
without laughing maidens pattered in 
bright kerchiefs and stout kirtles, going 
to and from the mass. Only in the little 
hut it was very dark and very cold. 

Nello and Patrasche were left utterly 
alone, for one night in the week before 
the Christmas Day, Death entered there, 
and took away from life for ever old Jehan 
Daas, who had never known of life aught 
save its poverty and its pains. He had 
long been half dead, incapable of any 
movement except a feeble gesture, and 
powerless for anything beyond a gentle 
word; and yet his loss fell on them both 
with a great horror in it: they mourned 


7O A DOG OF FLANDERS. 


him passionately. He had passed away 
from them in his sleep, and when in the 
gray dawn they learned their bereavement, 
unutterable solitude and desolation seemed 








to close around them. He had long been 
only a poor, feeble, paralyzed old man, 
who could not raise a hand in their de- 
fence, but he had loved-them well: his 
smile had always welcomed their return. 
They mourned for him unceasingly, refus- 


A DOG OF FLANDERS. Zi 


ing to be comforted, as in the white 
winter day they followed the deal shell 
that held his body to the nameless grave 
by the little gray church. They were his 
only mourners, these two whom he had 
left friendless upon earth — the young 
boy and the old dog. “Surely, he will 
relent now and let the poor lad come 
hither?” thought the miller’s wife, glanc- 
ing at her husband where he smoked by 
the hearth. 

Baas Cogez knew her thought, but he 
hardened his heart, and would not un- 
bar his door as the little, humble funeral 
went by. “The boy is a beggar,” he 
said to himself: “he shall not be about 
Alois.” 

The woman dared not say anything 
aloud, but when the grave was closed and 
the mourners had gone, she put a wreath 
of immortelles into Alois’ hands and bade 
her go and lay it reverently on the dark, 
unmarked mound where the snow was 
displaced. 

Nello and Patrasche went home with 


72 A DOG OF FLANDERS. 


broken hearts. But even of that poor, 
melancholy, cheerless home they were 
denied the consolation. There was a 
month’s rent over-due for their little 
home, and when Nello had paid the last 
sad service to the dead he had not a coin 
left. He went and begged grace of the 
owner of the hut, a cobbler who went 
every Sunday night to drink his pint of 
wine and smoke with Baas Cogez. The 
cobbler would grant no mercy. He was 
a harsh, miserly man, and loved money. 
He claimed in default of his rent every 
stick and stone, every pot and pan, in the 
hut, and bade Nello and Patrasche be out 
of it on the morrow. 

Now, the cabin was lowly enough, and 
in some sense miserable enough, and yet 
their hearts clove to it with a great affec- 
tion. They had been so happy there, and 
in the summer, with its clambering vine 
and its flowering beans, it was so pretty 
and bright in the midst of the sun-lighted 
fields! Their life in it had been full of 
labor and privation, and yet they had been 


A DOG OF FLANDERS. 73 


so well content, so gay of heart, running 
together to meet the old man’s never-failing 
smile of welcome! 

All night long the boy and the dog sat 
by the fireless hearth in the darkness, 
drawn close together for warmth and sor- 
row. Their bodies were insensible to the 
cold, but their hearts seemed frozen in 
them. ; 

When the morning broke over the 
white, chill earth it was the morning of 
Christmas Eve. With a shudder, Nello 
clasped close to him his only friend, while 
his tears fell hot and fast on the dog’s 
Menketorenead. “Let us go, Patrasche 
—dear, dear Patrasche,’ he murmured. 
“We will not wait to be kicked out: let 
us go.” | 

Patrasche had no will but his, and they 
went sadly, side by side, out from the little 
place which was so dear to them both, and 
in which every humble, homely thing was 
to them precious and beloved. Patrasche 
drooped his head wearily as he passed by 
his own green cart: it was no longer his 


74. A DOG OF FLANDERS. 


—it had to go with the rest to pay the 
rent, and his brass harness lay idle and 
glittering on the snow. The dog could 
have lain down beside it and died for very 
heart-sickness as he went, but whilst the 
lad lived and needed him Patrasche would 
not yield and give way. 

They took the old accustomed road into 
Antwerp. The day had yet scarce more 
than dawned, most of the shutters were 
still closed, but some of the villagers were 
about. They took no notice whilst the 
dog and the boy passed by them. At one 
door Nello paused and looked wistfully 
within: his grandfather had done many a 
kindly turn in neighbor’s service to the 
people who dwelt there. 

“Would you give Patrasche a crust?” 
he said, timidly. “ He is old, and he has 
had nothing since last forenoon.” 

The woman shut the door hastily, mur- 
muring some vague saying about wheat 
and rye being very dear that season. The 
boy and the dog went on again wearily: 
they asked no more, | 


A DOG OF FLANDERS. 76 


By slow and painful ways they reached 
Antwerp as the chimes tolled ten. 

“Tf I had anything about me I could 
sell to get him bread!” thought Nello, 
but he had nothing except the wisp of 





linen and serge that covered him, and his 
pair of wooden shoes. 

Patrasche understood, and nestled his 
nose into the lad’s hand, as though to 
pray him not to be disquieted for any woe 
or want of his. © 

The winner of the drawing-prize was 
to be proclaimed at noon, and to the pub- 


76 A DOG OF FLANDERS. 


lic building where he had left his treasure 
Nello made his way. On the steps and 
in the entrance-hall there was a crowd of 
youths — some of his age, some older, all 
with parents or relatives or friends. His 
heart was sick with fear as he went 
amongst them, holding Patrasche close to 
him. The great bells of the city clashed 
out the hour of noon with brazen clamor. 
The doors of the inner hall were opened ; 
the eager, panting throng rushed in: it 
was known that the selected picture would 
be raised above the rest upon a wooden 
dais. 

A mist obscured Nello’s sight, his head 
swam, his limbs almost failed him. When 
his vision cleared he saw the drawing 
raised on high: it was not his own! A 
slow, sonorous voice was proclaiming 
aloud that victory had been adjudged to 
Stephan Kiesslinger, born in the burgh 
of Antwerp, son of a wharfinger in that 
town. | 
When Nello recovered his conscious- 
ness he was lying on the stones- without, 


A DOG OF FLANDERS. vi | 


and Patrasche was trying with every art 
he knew to call him back to life. In the 
distance a throng of the youths of Ant- 
werp were shouting around their suc- 
cessful comrade, and escorting him with 
acclamations to his home upon the quay. 

The boy staggered to his feet and 
drew the dog into his embrace. “It is 
all over, dear Patrasche,” he murmured — 
Pallover!” 

He rallied himself as best he could, for 
he was weak from fasting, and retraced 
his steps to the village. Patrasche paced 
by his side with his head drooping and 
his old limbs feeble from hunger and 
sorrow. 

The snow was falling fast: a keen hur- 
ricane blew from the north: it was bitter 
as death on the plains. It took them 
long to traverse the familiar path, and the 
bells were sounding four of the clock as 
they approached the hamlet. Suddenly 
Patrasche paused, arrested by a scent in 
the snow, scratched, whined, and drew 
out with his teeth a small case of brown 


78 A DOG OF FLANDERS. 


leather. He held it up to Nello in the 
darkness. Where they were there stood 
a little Calvary, and a lamp 
burned dully under the cross: 
the boy mechanically turned 
the case to the light: on it 
was the name of Baas Cogez, 
and within it were notes for 
two thousand francs. 
The sight roused the lad 
a little from his stupor. He 
thrust it in his shirt, and 
\\ stroked Patrasche and 
XS. drew him onward. 
\\ « The-dog looked up 

SS wistfully in his 
. face: 

Nello made 
straight for the 
’ mill-house, and 


















































































went to 

OEE ge - aa, the house- 
ae ee = on ie 

wZZZe, DB, Se Ban door and 


struck on its panels. The millers wife 
opened it weeping, with little Alois cling- 


A DOG OF FLANDERS. 70 


ing close to her skirts. “Is it thee, thou 
poor lad?” she said kindly through her 
tears. ‘‘Get thee gone ere the Baas see 
thee. We are in sore trouble to-night. 
He is out seeking for a power of money 
that he has let fall riding homeward, and 
in this snow he never will find it; and God 
knows it will go nigh to ruin us. It is 
Heaven’s own judgment for the things we 
have done to thee.” 

Nello put the note-case in her hand 
and called Patrasche within the house. 
“Patrasche found the money to-night,” 
he said quickly. “Tell Baas Cogez so: 
I think he will not deny the dog shelter 
and food in his old age. Keep him from 
pursuing me, and I pray of you to be 
good to him.” 

Ere either woman or dog knew what 
he meant he had stooped and kissed Pa- 
trasche: then closed the door hurriedly, 
and disappeared in the gloom of the fast- 
falling night. 

The woman and the child stood speech- 
less with joy and fear: Patrasche vainly 


80 A DOG OF FLANDERS. 


spent the fury of his anguish against the 
iron-bound oak of the barred house-door. 
They did not dare unbar the door ana 
let him forth: they tried all they could 
to solace him. They brought him sweet 
cakes and juicy meats; they tempted him 
with the best they had; they tried to lure 
him to abide by the warmth of the hearth; 
but it was of no avail. Patrasche refused 
to be comforted or to stir from the barred 
portal. 

It was six o'clock when from an oppo- 
site entrance the miller at last came, jaded 
and broken, into his wife’s presence. “It 
is lost for ever,’ he said with an ashen 
cheek and a quiver in his stern voice. 
“We have looked with lanterns every- 
where: it 1s gone—the little maiden’s 
portion and all!” 

His wife put the money into his hand, 
and told him how it had come to her. 
The strong man sank trembling into a 
seat and covered his face, ashamed and 
almost afraid. “I have been cruel to the 
lad,” he muttered at lenoth; = idesemvea 
not to have good at his hands.” 


A DOG OF FLANDERS. Si 


Little Alois, taking courage, crept close 
to her father and nestled against him her 
fair curly head. “Nello may come here 
again, father?” she whispered. “He may 
come to-morrow as he used to do?” 

The miller pressed her in his arms: 
his hard, sun-burned face was very pale 
and his mouth trembled. “Surely, surely,” 
he answered his child. ‘‘ He shall bide 
here on Christmas Day, and any other 
day he will. God helping me, I will 
make amends to the boy—lI will make 
amends.” 

Little Alois kissed him in gratitude and 
joy, then slid from his knees and ran to 
where the dog kept watch by the door. 
“And to-night I may feast Patrasche?” 
she cried in a child’s thoughtless glee. 

Her father bent his head gravely: 
Seay tet the dog have the best;” for 
the stern old man was moved and shaken 
to his heart’s depths. 

It was Christmas Eve, and the mill- 
house was filled with oak logs and squares 
of turf, with cream and honey, with meat 


82 A DOG OF FLANDERS. 


and bread, and the rafters were hung with 
wreaths of evergreen, and the Calvary and 
the cuckoo clock looked out from a mass 
of holly. There were little paper lanterns 
too for Alois, and toys of various fashions 
and sweetmeats in bright-pictured papers. 
There were light and warmth and abun- 
dance everywhere, and the child would 
fain have meade the dog a guest honored 
and feasted. 

But Patrasche would neithe: 
lie in the warmth nor share in 
the cheer. Famished he was, 
and very cold, but without Nello 
he would partake neither of 
comfort nor food. Against all 
temptation he was proof, and 
close against the door he leaned 
always, watching only for a 
SSS. ~=Emeans of escape. 

A ona ORS “He wants the lad,” said 

Baas Cogez. “Good dog! 
good dog! I will go over to the lad the 
first thing at day-dawn.” For no one but 
Patrasche knew that Nello had left the 





AIOUG OF FLANDERS. 83 


hut, and no one but Patrasche divined 
that Nello had gone to face starvation 
and misery alone. 

The mill-kitchen was very warm; great 


logs crackled and flamed on the hearth; 















































neighbors came in for a glass of wine and 
a slice of the fat goose baking for supper. 
Alois, gleeful and sure of her playmate 
back on the morrow, bounded and sang 
and tossed back her yellow hair. Baas 
Cogez, in the fulness of his heart, smiled 
on her through moistened eyes, and spoke 


84 A DOG OF FLANDERS. 


of the way in which he would befriend her 
favorite companion; the house-mother sat 
with calm, contented face at the spinning- 
wheel; the cuckoo in the clock chirped 
mirthful hours. Amidst it all Patrasche 
was bidden with a thousand words of wel- 
come to tarry there a cherished guest. 
But neither peace nor plenty could allure 
him where Nello was not. 

When the supper smoked on the board, 
and the voices were loudest and gladdest, 
and the Christ-child brought choicest gifts 
to Alois, Patrasche, watching always an 
occasion, glided out when the door was 
unlatched by a careless new-comer, and as 
swiftly as his weak and tired limbs would 
bear him sped over the snow in the bitter, 
black night. He had only one thought — 
to follow Nello. A human friend might 
have paused for the pleasant meal, the 
cherry warmth, the cozy slumber; but that 
was not the friendship of Patrasche. He 
remembered a bygone time, when an old 
man and a little child had found him sick 
unto death in the wayside ditch, 


A DOG OF FLANDERS. 85 


Snow had fallen freshly all the evening 
long; it was now nearly ten; the trail of 
the boy’s footsteps was almost obliterated. 
It took Patrasche long to discover any 
scent. When at last he found it, it was 
lost again quickly, and 
lost and recovered, and 
again lost and again 
recovered, a hundred 
times or more. 

The night was very 
wild. The lamps un- 
der the wayside crosses 
were blown out; the 
roads were sheets of 
ice; the impenetrable darkness hid every 
trace of habitations; there was no living 
thing abroad. All the cattle were housed, 
and in all the huts and homesteads men 
and women rejoiced and feasted. There 
was only Patrasche out in the cruel cold 
—old and famished and full of pain, but 
with the strength and the patience of a 
great love to sustain him in his search. 

The trail of Nello’s steps, faint and ob- 





86 A DOG OF FLANDERS. 


scure as it was under the new snow, went 
straightly along the accustomed tracks into 
Antwerp. It was past midnight when Pa- 
trasche traced it over the boundapies of 
the town and into the narrow, tortuous, 
gloomy streets. It was all quite dark in 
the town, save where some light gleamed 
ruddily through the crevices 
of house-shutters, or some 
group went homeward with 
lanterns chanting drinkine- 
songs. The streets were all 
white with: ice: the high 
walls and roofs loomed black 
against them. There was 
scarce a sound save the riot of the winds 
down the passages as they tossed the 
creaking signs and shook the tall lamp- 
irons. : 

So many passers-by had trodden through 
and through the snow, so many diverse 
paths had crossed and recrossed each 
other, that the dog had a hard task to 
retain any hold on the track he followed. 
But he kept on his way, though the cold 





A DOG OF FLANDERS. 87 


Cd 


pierced him to the bone, and the jagged 
ice cut his feet, and the hunger in his 
body gnawed like a rat’s teeth. He kept 
on his way, a poor, gaunt, shivering thing, 














and by long patience traced the steps he 
loved into the very heart of the burgh and 
up to the steps of the great cathedral. 
Sige is gone to the things that he 
loved,’ thought Patrasche: he could not 


88 A DOG OF FLANDERS. 


understand, but he was full of sorrow and 
of pity for the art-passion that to him was 
so incomprehensible and yet so sacred. 

The portals of the cathedral were un- 
closed after the midnight mass. Some 
heedlessness in the custedians, too eager 
to go home and feast or sleep, or too 
drowsy to know whether they turned the 
keys aright, had left one of the doors 
unlocked. By that accident the footfalls 
Patrasche sought had passed through into 
the building, leaving the white marks of 
snow upon the dark stone floor. By that 
slender white thread, frozen as it fell, he 
was guided through the intense silence, 
through the immensity of the vaulted 
space — guided straight to the gates of 
the chancel, and, stretched there upon the 
stones, he found Nello. He crept up and 
touched the face of the boy. “ Didst thou 
dream that I should be faithless and for- 
sake thee? J,—a dog?” said that mute 
caress. 

The lad raised himself with a low cry 
and clasped him close. “Let us lie down 


A DOG OF FLANDERS. 89 


and die together,” he murmured. “Men 
have no need of us, and we are all alone.” 

In answer, Patrasche crept closer yet, 
and laid his head upon the young boy’s 
breast. The great tears stood in his 
brown, sad eyes: not for himself — for 
himself he was happy. 

They lay close together in the piercing 
cold. The blasts that blew over the Flem- 
ish dikes from the northern seas were like 
waves of ice, which froze every living thing 
they touched. The interior of the immense 
vault of stone in which they were was even 
more bitterly chill than the snow-covered 
plains without. Now and then a _ bat 
moved in the shadows— now and then 
a gleam of light came on the ranks of 
carven figures. Under the Rubens they 
lay together quite still, and soothed almost 
into a dreaming slumber by the numb- 
ing narcotic of the cold. Together they 
dreamed of the old glad days when they 
had chased each other through the flower- 
ing grasses of the summer meadows, or sat 
hidden in the tall bulrushes by the water’s 


go A DOG OF FLANDERS. 


side, watching the boats go seaward in the 
sun. 
Suddenly through the darkness a great 
white radiance streamed through the vast- 
ness of the aisles; the moon, that was at 
her height, had broken 
through the clouds, the 
snow had ceased to fall, 
the light reflected from 
the snow without was 
clear as the light of dawn. 
It fell through the arches 
full upon the two pictures 
above, from which the boy 
on his entrance had flung 
back the veil: the Eleva- 
tion and the Descent of the Cross were 
for one instant visible. 

Nello rose to his feet and stretched his 
arms to them: the tears of a passionate 
ecstasy glistened on the paleness of his 
face. “I have seen them at last!” he cried 
aloud. “O God, it is enough!” 

His limbs failed under him, and he sank 
upon his knees, still gazing upward at the 





A DOG OF FLANDERS. gI 


majesty that he adored. For a few brief. 
moments the light illumined the divine 
visions that had been denied to him so 
long —light clear and sweet and strong 
as though it streamed from the throne of 
Heaven. Then suddenly it passed away: 
once more a great darkness covered the 
face of Christ. 

The arms of the boy drew close again 
the body of the dog. “We shall see His 
face — there,’ he murmured; “and He will 
not part us, I think.” 

On the morrow, by the chancel of the 
cathedral, the people of Antwerp found 
them both. They were both dead: the 
cold of the night had frozen into stillness 
alike the young life and the old. When 
the Christmas morning broke and the 
priests came to the temple, they saw them 
lying thus on the stones together. Above, 
the veils were drawn back from the great 
visions of Rubens, and the fresh rays of 
the sunrise touched the thorn-crowned 
head of the Christ. 

As the day grew on there came an old, 


92 A DOG OF FLANDERS. 


hard-featured man who wept as women 
weep. “I was. cruel to) the wiacdsa 
muttered, “and now I would have made 
amends — yea, to the half of my substance 
—and he should have been to me as a 
son.” 

There came also, as the day grew apace, 
a painter who had fame in the world, and 
who was liberal of hand and of spirit. “I 
seek one who should have had the prize 
yesterday had worth won,” he said to the 
people —‘“‘a boy of rare promise and gen- 
ius. An old wood-cutter on a fallen tree 
at eventide — that was all his theme. But 
there was greatness for the future in it. 
I would fain find him, and take him with 
me and teach him Art.” 

And a little child with curling fair hair, 
sobbing bitterly as she clung to her father’s 
arm, cried aloud, ‘Oh, Nello, come! We 
have all ready for thee. The Christ-child’s 
hands are full of gifts, and the old piper 
will play for us; and the mother says thou 
shalt stay by the hearth and burn nuts 
with us all the Noél week long —yes, 


A DOG OF FLANDERS. 03 


a 


even to the Feast of the Kings! And 
Patrasche will be so happy! Oh, Nello, 
wake and come!” 

But the young pale face, turned upward 
to the light of the great Rubens with a 
smile upon its mouth, answered them all, 
“Tt is too late.” 

For the sweet, sonorous bells went ring- 
ing through the frost, and the sunlight 
shone upon the plains of snow, and the 
populace trooped gay and glad through 
the streets, but Nello and Patrasche no 
more asked charity at their hands. All 
they needed now Antwerp gave unbidden. 

Death had been more pitiful to them 
than longer life would have been. It had 
taken the one in the loyalty of love, and 
the other in the innocence of faith, from a 
world which for love has no recompense 
and for faith no fulfilment. 

All their lives they had been together, 
and in their deaths they were not divided ; 
for when they were found the arms of the 
boy were folded too closely around the 
dog to be severed without violence, and 


94 A DOG OF FLANDERS. 


the people of their little village, contrite 
and ashamed, implored a special grace for 
them, and, making them one grave, laid 
them to rest there side by side —for ever! 












































THE 


Cosy Corner Series 


A SERIES OF CHARMING ILLUSTRATED 
JUVENILES BY WELL-KNOWN AUTHORS 








We shall issue ten new volumes in this well-known 
series of child classics, and announce four as follows: 


A Little Puritan Pioneer 


By EDITH ROBINSON 
Author of **A Loyal Little Maid,’’ «* A Little Puri- 
tan’s First Christmas,’’ etc. 


- Madam Liberality 


By MRS. EWING 
Author of << Jackanapes,’’ «*A Great Emergency,”’ 
«Story of a Short Life,’’ etc., etc. 


A Bad Penny 


By JOHN T. WHEELWRIGHT 













The other seven will include new stories by Louise 
de la Ramée, Miss Mulock, Nellie Hellis, Will Allen 


Dromgoole, etc., etc. 





Forty-four volumes previously published 


SEND FOR CIRCULARS, ETC. 


L. C. Pace & Company’s 


Cosy Corner Series 


OF 


Charming Juveniles 


& 
Each one volume, J6mo, cloth, Illustrated, 50 cents 
& 


Ole Mammy’s Torment. By ANNIE FELLOws-JOHNSTON 
Author of “ The Little Colonel,” etc 


The Little Colonel. By ANNIE FELLOWS-JOHNSTON. 
Author of “ Big Brother.” 


Big Brother. By ANNIE FELLOWS-JOHNSTON. 
Author of “ The Little Colonel,” etc. 


The Gate of the Giant Scissors. By ANNIE FELLOWS. 
JOHNSTON. 
Author of “ The Little Colonel,” etc 


Two Little Knights of Kentucky, who were “The Little 
Colonel’s” neighbors. By ANNIE FELLOWS-JOHNSTON. 
A sequel to “ The Little Colonel.” 


The Story of Dago. By ANNIE FELLOWS-JOHNSTON. 
Author of “ The Little Colonel,” etc. 


Farmer Brown and the Birds. By FRANCES MARGARET 
Fox. A little story which teaches children that the birds 
are man’s best friends. - 


Cosy Corner Series — Continued. 


Stoty of a Short Life. By JuLiana Horatia EwIne. 
This beautiful and pathetic story is a part of the world’s 
literature and will never die. ; 


Jackanapes. By JULIANA HoORATIA EWING. 
A new edition, with new illustrations, of this exquisite and 
touching story, dear alike to young and old. 


The Little Lame Prince. By Miss MuLock. 
A delightful story of a little boy who has many adventures 
by means of the magic gifts of his fairy godmother. 


The Adventures of a Brownie. By Miss MuLock. 
The story of a household elf who torments the cook and 
gardener, but is a constant joy and delight to the children. 


His Little Mother. By Miss MuLock. 

Miss Mulock’s short stories for children are a constant 
source of delight to them, and “ His Little Mother,” in 
this new and attractive dress, will be welcomed by hosts 
of readers. 


Little Sunshine’s Holiday. By Miss Mutock. 
“Tittle Sunshine” is another of those beautiful child- 
characters for which Miss Mulock is so justly famous. 


Wee Dorothy. By LaurA UPDEGRAFF. 
A story of two orphan children, the tender devotion of the 
eldest, a boy, for his sister being its theme. 


Rab and His Friends. By Dr. JoHN Brown. 
Doctor Brown’s little masterpiece is too well known to 
need description. 


The Water People. By CHARLES LEE SLEIGHT. 
Relating the further adventures of “ Harry,” the little hero 
of “The Prince of the Pin Elves.” 


The Prince of the Pin Elves. By CHAs. LEE SLEIGHT. 
A fascinating story of the underground adventures of a 
sturdy, reliant American boy among the elves and 
gnomes. 


Helena’s Wonderworld. By Frances Hopces WHITE. 
A delightful tale of the adventures of a little girl in the 
mysterious regions beneath the sea. 


Cosy Corner Series — Continued. 


For His Country. By MARSHALL SAUNDERS. 
A beautiful story of a patriotic little American lad. 


A Little Puritan’s First Christmas, By EDIrH ROBINSON. 


A Little Daughter of Liberty, By Epiru RoBinson. 
Author of “A Loyal Little Maid,” “A Little Puritan 
Rebel,” etc 
A true story of the Revolution. 


A Little Puritan Rebel, By EDITH ROBINSON. 
An historical tale of a real girl, during the time when the 
gallant Sir Harry Vane was governor of Massachusetts. 


A Loyal Little Maid. By EpirH RoBInson. 

A delightful and interesting story of Revolutionary days, 
in which the child heroine, Betsey Schuyler, renders im- 
portant services to George Washington and Alexander 
Hamilton. 


A Dog of Flanders, A CHRiIstmas STory. By LOUISE 
DE LA RAMEE (Ouida). 


The Nurnberg Stove. By LouIsE DE LA RAMEE (Ouida). 
This beautiful story has never before been published at a 
popular price. 


The King of the Golden River, A LEGEND oF STIRIA. 
By JOHN RUSKIN. 
Written fifty years or more ago, this little fairy tale soon 
became known and made a place for itself. 


La Belle Nivernaise. THE STory oF AN OLD BOAT AND 
HER CREW. By ALPHONSE DAUDET. 
It has been out of print for some time, and is now offered 
in cheap but dainty form in this new edition. 


The Young King. The Star Child. 
Two stories chosen from a recent volume by a gifted 
author, on account of their rare beauty, great power, 
and deep significance. 


A Great Emergency. By Mrs. EwIne. 


The Trinity Flower. By JuLIANA HorATIA EWING. 
In this little volume are collected three of Mrs. Ewing’s 
best short stories for the young people. 


Cosy Corner Series — Continued. 


The Adventures of Beatrice and Jessie. By RICHARD 
MANSFIELD. 
A bright and amusing story of the strange adventures of 
two little girls in the “‘ realms of unreality.” 


A Child’s Garden of Verses. By R. L. STEVENSON. 
This little classic is undoubtedly the best of all volumes of 
poetry for children. 


Little King Davie. By NELLIE HELLIs. 
It is sufficient to say of this book that it has sold over 
110,000 copies in England, and consequently should well 
be worthy of a place in “ The Cosy Corner Series.” 


Little Peterkin Vandike. By CHARLES STUART PRATT. 

The author’s dedication furnishes a key to this charming 
story. 

3} oui this book, made for the amusement of the 
boys who may read it, to the memory of one boy, who 
would have enjoyed as much as Peterkin the plays of 
the Poetry Party.” 


The Making of Zimri Bunker, A TALE oF NANTUCKET. 
By W. J. Lona. 

The story deals with a sturdy American fisher lad during 
the war of 1812. 


The Fortunes of the Fellow. By WiLt_ ALLEN Drom- 
GOOLE. A-sequel to “The Farrier’s Dog and His 
Fellow.” 


The Farrier’s Dog and His Fellow. By WiILt ALLEN 
DROMGOOLE. 
This story, written by the gifted young Southern woman, 
will appeal to all that is best in the natures of her many 
admirers. 


The Sleeping Beauty. A MopERN VERSION. By MARTHA 
B. DUNN. 
A charming story of a little fishermaid of Maine, intellect- 
ually “asleep,” until she meets the ‘‘ Fairy Prince.” 


The Young Archer. By CHARLEs E. BRIMBLECOM. 
A strong and wholesome story of a boy who accompanied 
Columbus on his voyage to the New World. 


NEW JUVENILES 


sheen 
Little Cousin Series 


By MARY F. WADE 


Four volumes, each illustrated, cloth, 12mo, 75 cents 
VoLuME I. 
Our Little Japanese Cousin 


VotumME II. 
Our Little Brown Cousin 


VotumeE III. 


Our Little Indian Cousin 


VoLuME IV. 
Our Little Russian Cousin 
os 


These are the most interesting and delightful accounts 
possible of child-life in other lands, filled with quaint 
sayings, doings and adventures. ‘The ‘** Little Japanese 
Cousin,’’ with her toys in her wide sleeve and her tiny 
bag of paper handkerchiefs ; the ¢* Little Brown Cousin,”’ 
in whose home the leaves of the breadfruit-tree serve for 
plates and the halves of the cocoanut shells for cups ; the 
<< Little Indian Cousin,’’ who lives the free life of the 
forest, and the << Little Russian Cousin,’’ who dwells by 
the wintry Neva, are truly fascinating characters to the 
little cousins who will read about them. 


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NEW JUVENILES 


THE 


Rosamond Tales 


By CUYLER REYNOLDS 


With many full-page illustrations from original photo- 
graphs by the author, together with a frontispiece from a 
drawing by Maud Humphreys. 


Large 12mo, cloth, $1.50 


&* 


These are just the bedtime stories that children always 
ask for, but do not always get. Rosamond and Rosalind 
are the hero and heroine of many happy adventures in 


town and on their grandfather’s farm; and the happy 


listeners to their story will unconsciously absorb a vast 


amount of interesting knowledge of birds, animals, and 
flowers, just the things about which the curiosity of 
children from four to twelve years old is most insatiable. 
The book will be a boon to tired mothers, as a delight to 


wide-awake children. 


SEND FOR CIRCULARS, ETC. 





NEW JUVENILES 


Prince Harold 


A FAIRY STORY 


By L. F. BROWN 
With ninety full-page illustrations 


Large 12mo, cloth, $1.50 


& 


A delightful fairy tale for children, dealing with the 


life of a charming young Prince, who, aided by the Moon 
Spirit, discovers, after many adventures, a beautiful girl 
whom he makes his Princess. He is so enamored that 
he dwells with his bride in complete seclusion for a 
while, entrusting the conduct of his kingdom meantime 
to his monkey servant, Longtail. ‘The latter marries 
a monkey princess from Amfalulu, and their joint reign is 
described with the drollest humor. The real rulers 
finally return and upset the reign of the pretenders. An 


original and fascinating story for young people. 


SEND FOR CIRCULARS, ETC. 




















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